Hugh Ryan discusses his book When Brooklyn Was Queer about the LGBTQ history of Brooklyn. (3/18/19)
Hugh Ryan’s “When Brooklyn Was Queer” is a groundbreaking exploration of the LGBT history of Brooklyn, from the early days of Walt Whitman in the 1850s up through the queer women who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, and beyond. Not only has Brooklyn always lived in the shadow of queer Manhattan neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem, but there has also been a systematic erasure of its queer history―a great forgetting. In this installment of “Leonard Lopate at Large” on WBAI, Hugh Ryan discusses this largely untold history.